Brightest Young Things

The Failures of the Modern World a review of Shalimar the Clown
(2005), by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie was on a five-year losing streak when this novel came out,
late in 2005. Both the self-indulgent "The Ground Beneath Her Feet,"
and the pointlessly vapid "Fury" showed an alarming trend towards
believing his own press. I mean, before "Ground," I thought he could
do no wrong, and his name was being bandied about as the world's most
deserving recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature that has yet to
receive one (Dario Fo, anyone?). After, well, I figured someone was
giving him bad advice, especially in "Fury," to write about the modern
world and leave behind all the baggage of extended digressions and
magical realism.

All credit to Rushdie, then, for a jolting return to form with
"Shalimar." This portrait of evil on a regional (Kashmir) and
personal (Shalimar) scale is incredibly relevant today. As painful as
it is to compose such a banal sentiment, I think it's necessary. I
think it's quite brave of an author whose fame is regrettably and
inextricably linked not to his astounding facility with words and
stories, but instead to his personification of the conflict within
Islam, to write fiction about the creation and spread of the deadly
virus of fatal fanaticism. Indeed, through his now-familiar method of
weaving a tale of community via magical realism, and then casting it
within Kashmir, Rushdie makes comprehensible without justifying or
simplifying, the conflict within human hearts that turns men to mass
murder. Not via economic forces, nor through an inevitable clash of
civilizations, but through the more familiar and despairing forces of
over-familiarity, desire, envy, jealousy, love, misunderstanding and
hatred.

At the same time, Rushdie fuses this story of communal paradise, lost,
with a very personal disaster and relationship's collapse, and,
against all odds, associates the two flows without cheapening the
former nor an ennobling of the latter. The result, for the reader, is
a feeling of inescapable sadness, inevitability, and disappointment
for the collective and enduring failure of man; an appreciation for
the tragedy in Kashmir, and a very, very personal understanding of why
some men turn to madness. The story is that age old-story; boy meets
girl, boy proposes to girl, girl runs off with diplomat, boy becomes
super-terrorist and hunts down diplomat, spawn of illicit relationship
between girl and diplomat seeks revenge, and everyone dies unhappy.
This being Rushdie, everyone has a weird name (Max Ophuls – more on
that later, India, Boonyi, Shalimar), an incredible back-story (the
diplomat was a hero of the French Resistance, for instance), and
wondrous digressions abound. That said, the novel takes a little
getting used to. I spent the first few chapters wondering if this was
going anywhere interesting at all. Perseverance paid off massive
dividends, as this is a thoroughly engrossing and enjoyable, if sad,
novel. By the time I reached the Iron Mullah and his bastard minions,
I couldn't put the novel aside until finished.

I hate to speak in such glib terms, but I would go so far as to say
that this novel is powerful and timely. The strange affectations of
Rushdie's writing come across as lost friends. The strangest is the
naming of the protagonist "Max Ophüls," seemingly with no more meaning
than a showy flourish of the pen. Ophüls, as I'm sure you know, is
one of the greatest film directors of all time. As a German Jew in
World War II, he fled Germany, after making some very good films, for
France, where he more good films, fleeing the Nazis a second time for
the United States, where he made the breathtaking "Letter from an
Unknown Woman," returning to Europe to make two or three of the
greatest movies of all time (c.f., The Earrings of Madame de…, La
Ronde, Lola Montes). I can think of no reason why Rushdie would use a
name so fraught with incredible history only to create a memorable
character of his own with a different, but also remarkable,
back-story.

Regrettably, "Shalimar" is likely to be considered a timely book for
decades to come. Would that murderous religious fanaticism were a
hopelessly outdated concept.